Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Applications for AI Safety Camp 2022 Now Open!, published by Adam Shimi on November 17, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

If you’ve read about alignment research and you want to start contributing, the new iteration of the AI Safety Camp is a great opportunity!

It’s a virtual camp from January to May 2022, where you collaborate with other applicants to work (1h / normal workday, 7h / weekend sprint day) on open problems proposed and supervised by mentors like John Wentworth, Beth Barnes, Stuart Armstrong, Daniel Kokotajlo. Around this core of research, the camp also includes talks and discussions about fundamental ideas in the field, how alignment research works, and how and where to get a job/funding.

All in all, the AI Safety Camp is a great opportunity if:

You have read enough about alignment that you’re convinced of the importance of the problem

You want to do alignment research (whether conceptual or applied), or to collaborate with alignment researchers (doing policy for example)

You don’t feel yet like you have enough research taste and grasp of the field to choose your research problems yourself yet

Note that you don’t need advanced maths skills to participate in the camp, as some of the projects don’t require any specific skillset or very unusual ones (evolutionary genetics, history...). If you care about alignment and are in this situation, I encourage you to apply for a project without required skillsets and learn what you need as you go along.

All the details on how to apply are available on the website (including the list of open problems).

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ambitious Altruistic Software Engineering Efforts: Opportunities and Benefits, published by Ozzie Gooen on November 17, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is part 1 of what I expect to be a 3-part series. The next parts will focus on the costs of these technical projects and more specific ways to kickstart them.

Meta

Rigor: Writing based on my experiences and education in the tech industry. I spent around 50 hours on this series plus some sporadic thinking and discussion. I focused more on idea quantity than neatness or data.

Intended Audience: Effective altruists interested in either funding or working on ambitious software projects.

History: This series was originally written as one Google Doc in March 2021 for private conversations. I've since done some updating to post it publicly. One important update since this document was written is that the CEA tech team has seemed to really up hiring considerably. This seems great, though I'm sure we could have even more, so it still seemed useful to post this.

About me (Ozzie Gooen): I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several years. I joined 80,000 Hours as a web developer in 2013 hoping to do major/ambitious work, but there I realized that the funding situation at the time wasn’t large enough for most ambitious software efforts. I’ve since spent time in other startups, making my own startups, and doing consulting for small and large companies.

Recently I’ve been planning what work QURI should do. We’re considering focusing on engineering. Some of the motivation for this topic is to help make decisions for QURI.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Aaron Gertler, Rachel Bui, JP Addison, Daniel Kokotajlo, Adam Gleave, Daniel Eth, Oliver Habryka, Jonas Vollmer, and Nuño Sempere for their comments.

Motivation

When I think of,

There’s an elite community with a net worth of over $40 Billion, made up of many genius mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs and they’re trying to optimize the future of the world

I think of things like this:

(From Iron Man 2)

Right now we clearly don’t have this. Open Philanthropy and other core effective altruism organizations are highly philosophically focused as opposed to technically focused. This seems like a good beginning, but perhaps a suboptimal end.

Large technical implementations would be expensive ($10 Million to $100 Million+ per year). They would be different from current setups in some key ways. But I think they could be worth it.

Perhaps the best analogy would be that of the finance industry. Early on there were clever individuals or small teams who would intuitively make bets with very little information. Financial bets are very similar to making altruistic decisions. Charitable funding decisions are particularly equivalent, but so might be more generic things like career decisions. Over time the financial sector became far more sophisticated, with intense specialization, formalization, and expertise. Data-heavy and quant-based approaches have become decisive in much of the market, and continue to expand. We might expect altruistic decisions to follow a similar trajectory; begin with clever people using intuitions (like with existing EA funders), and expand to use more data and automation.

One counter-example in the field of finance is venture capital firms that invest with (relatively) little data. However, they exist in environments with applications like Crunchbase, AngelList, and other tools, that organize and charge for data.

Select Project Ideas

What should we code? I'm less certain about particular software interventions than I am about us being able to find some good bets (assuming we have good people).

I personally see software opportunities all around me, but it's difficult to put them into distinct large-project-size clusters. Lots of internal tools ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ambitious Altruistic Software Engineering Efforts: Opportunities and Benefits, published by Ozzie Gooen on November 17, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is part 1 of what I expect to be a 3-part series. The next parts will focus on the costs of these technical projects and more specific ways to kickstart them.

Meta

Rigor: Writing based on my experiences and education in the tech industry. I spent around 50 hours on this series plus some sporadic thinking and discussion. I focused more on idea quantity than neatness or data.

Intended Audience: Effective altruists interested in either funding or working on ambitious software projects.

History: This series was originally written as one Google Doc in March 2021 for private conversations. I've since done some updating to post it publicly. One important update since this document was written is that the CEA tech team has seemed to really up hiring considerably. This seems great, though I'm sure we could have even more, so it still seemed useful to post this.

About me (Ozzie Gooen): I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several years. I joined 80,000 Hours as a web developer in 2013 hoping to do major/ambitious work, but there I realized that the funding situation at the time wasn’t large enough for most ambitious software efforts. I’ve since spent time in other startups, making my own startups, and doing consulting for small and large companies.

Recently I’ve been planning what work QURI should do. We’re considering focusing on engineering. Some of the motivation for this topic is to help make decisions for QURI.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Aaron Gertler, Rachel Bui, JP Addison, Daniel Kokotajlo, Adam Gleave, Daniel Eth, Oliver Habryka, Jonas Vollmer, and Nuño Sempere for their comments.

Motivation

When I think of,

There’s an elite community with a net worth of over $40 Billion, made up of many genius mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs and they’re trying to optimize the future of the world

I think of things like this:

(From Iron Man 2)

Right now we clearly don’t have this. Open Philanthropy and other core effective altruism organizations are highly philosophically focused as opposed to technically focused. This seems like a good beginning, but perhaps a suboptimal end.

Large technical implementations would be expensive ($10 Million to $100 Million+ per year). They would be different from current setups in some key ways. But I think they could be worth it.

Perhaps the best analogy would be that of the finance industry. Early on there were clever individuals or small teams who would intuitively make bets with very little information. Financial bets are very similar to making altruistic decisions. Charitable funding decisions are particularly equivalent, but so might be more generic things like career decisions. Over time the financial sector became far more sophisticated, with intense specialization, formalization, and expertise. Data-heavy and quant-based approaches have become decisive in much of the market, and continue to expand. We might expect altruistic decisions to follow a similar trajectory; begin with clever people using intuitions (like with existing EA funders), and expand to use more data and automation.

One counter-example in the field of finance is venture capital firms that invest with (relatively) little data. However, they exist in environments with applications like Crunchbase, AngelList, and other tools, that organize and charge for data.

Select Project Ideas

What should we code? I'm less certain about particular software interventions than I am about us being able to find some good bets (assuming we have good people).

I personally see software opportunities all around me, but it's difficult to put them into distinct large-project-size clusters. Lots of internal tools ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Quadratic Voting and Collusion, published by leogao on November 17, 2021 on LessWrong.

Quadratic voting is a proposal for a voting system that ensures participants cast a number of votes proportional to the degree they care about the issue by making the marginal cost of each additional vote linearly increasing - see this post by Vitalik for an excellent introduction.

One major issue with QV is collusion - since the marginal cost of buying one vote is different for different people, if you could spread a number of votes out across multiple people, you could buy more votes for the same amount of money. For instance, suppose you and a friend have $100 each, and you care only about Cause A and they care only about Cause B, and neither of you care about any of the other causes up for vote. You could spend all of your $100 on A and they could spend all of theirs on B, or you could both agree to each spend $50 on A and $50 on B, which would net √2 times the votes for both A and B as opposed to the default.

The solution generally proposed in response to this issue is to ensure that the vote is truly secret, to the extent that you cannot even prove to anyone else who you voted for. The thinking is that this creates a prisoner's dilemma where by defecting, you manage to obtain both the $50 from your friend and also the full $100 from yourself for your own cause, and that because there is no way to confirm how you voted, there are no possible externalities to create incentives for not defecting.

Unfortunately, I have two objections to this solution, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical objection is that if the two agents are able to accurately predict each others' actions and reason using FDT, then it is possible for the two agents to cooperate à la FairBot - this circumvents the inability to prove what you voted for after the fact by proving ahead of time what you will vote. The practical objection is that people tend to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas a significant amount of the time anyways, and in general a lot of people tend to uphold promises they make even if the other party has no way to verify. I think there's even an argument to be made that the latter is at least partially a real world instance of the former.

I'm still optimistic that this might not be a showstopping problem in practice, since there is a limited pool of people who you would trust in practice, which puts a ceiling on how many times your vote can count. However, I think this is still a major unavoidable flaw with QV for both practical and theoretical applications.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Quadratic Voting and Collusion, published by leogao on November 17, 2021 on LessWrong.

Quadratic voting is a proposal for a voting system that ensures participants cast a number of votes proportional to the degree they care about the issue by making the marginal cost of each additional vote linearly increasing - see this post by Vitalik for an excellent introduction.

One major issue with QV is collusion - since the marginal cost of buying one vote is different for different people, if you could spread a number of votes out across multiple people, you could buy more votes for the same amount of money. For instance, suppose you and a friend have $100 each, and you care only about Cause A and they care only about Cause B, and neither of you care about any of the other causes up for vote. You could spend all of your $100 on A and they could spend all of theirs on B, or you could both agree to each spend $50 on A and $50 on B, which would net √2 times the votes for both A and B as opposed to the default.

The solution generally proposed in response to this issue is to ensure that the vote is truly secret, to the extent that you cannot even prove to anyone else who you voted for. The thinking is that this creates a prisoner's dilemma where by defecting, you manage to obtain both the $50 from your friend and also the full $100 from yourself for your own cause, and that because there is no way to confirm how you voted, there are no possible externalities to create incentives for not defecting.

Unfortunately, I have two objections to this solution, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical objection is that if the two agents are able to accurately predict each others' actions and reason using FDT, then it is possible for the two agents to cooperate à la FairBot - this circumvents the inability to prove what you voted for after the fact by proving ahead of time what you will vote. The practical objection is that people tend to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas a significant amount of the time anyways, and in general a lot of people tend to uphold promises they make even if the other party has no way to verify. I think there's even an argument to be made that the latter is at least partially a real world instance of the former.

I'm still optimistic that this might not be a showstopping problem in practice, since there is a limited pool of people who you would trust in practice, which puts a ceiling on how many times your vote can count. However, I think this is still a major unavoidable flaw with QV for both practical and theoretical applications.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why I am no longer driven, published by dominicq on November 16, 2021 on LessWrong.

(cross-posted from my blog, Sunday Stopwatch)

I used to be very driven. I'm talking "wake up at 4 AM, go run with my dog, take a cold shower, study for two hours, go work, meditate, cook, go to MMA practice, read a book before bed" driven. I was very ready to, you know, get after it. As you might notice from the title, this is no longer true. Why?

The first and obvious explanation is that I'm getting older. I have no way of confirming or denying this - it really could be the case that it's some mashup of biological processes that works independently of whatever my subjective experience of life is. But I'm 29, which doesn't seem old at all, so what are the other reasons?

The first reason I can think of is that normal, everyday life is actually difficult. This may be an entirely personal phenomenon, but I find that I semi-consciously categorize my life into two areas: "takes energy" and "doesn't take energy". Things that take energy are the big important things, like studying for some important professional certification or completing a big project or whatever. And things that don't take energy include all the backend admin work: the cooking, the cleaning, the handling of people, the coordinating, the who's gonna take the dog for a walk, the did you remember that we have a family lunch this weekend, and more.

You don't have to be particularly attentive to realize that the "doesn't take energy" category is completely bogus. It's a scam, one that I've willingly enrolled myself into. My general theory for why I've done this to myself is the implicit attitude that if you do things "right", things from this other category shouldn't take time or energy. Like, these are the basics, right, and the basics shouldn't be hard. I don't know, it doesn't make a lot of sense when I look into it, which is why it's a total scam. Things that don't take energy, take energy.

There's something more that's sorta related. Sometimes, you do a thing that "takes energy" and that's it, you've done it, done. But projects usually require maintenance after you do the project itself, so now you have to, again, do the backend admin work. If you study something, you have to apply it or at least go through some flash cards because otherwise, you're losing it. If you train some skill, same thing. If you get promoted, you have a harder baseline job. If you buy a house, congratulations on your second job!

Then there's also the fact that just a basic, regular day isn't always equally draining. If you have some issue at work, you might be tempted to wave it off as a minor hindrance, a minor annoyance, not something worth your energy and attention as you come back home. Because, hey, it's just this silly little thing, I shouldn't be bothered at all. But you can't talk yourself out of a problem you didn't talk yourself into in the first place. So you come home, and sure enough, you have your regular set of things that you're supposed to do now but which don't take energy, but in addition, you've actually, in reality, had a very, very, very difficult day (and you're pretending you didn't because you feel it shouldn't have affected you that much).

So that's one type of explanation. The other one is disillusionment, or, at least, a change of mindset. I can see a change in the type of YouTube video that I can stomach these days. I used to watch those "How I Keep Productive, Work on 15000 Side Hustles, Run 3 Marathons a Day, and Earn 3 Million Dollars A Month" videos and then I stopped. I just can't anymore. And in particular, I can no longer watch stuff that takes inspiration out of fiction. I used to have a small theory that went something like this: you are very affected by the circle of people around you, but it doesn't make tha...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why I am no longer driven, published by dominicq on November 16, 2021 on LessWrong.

(cross-posted from my blog, Sunday Stopwatch)

I used to be very driven. I'm talking "wake up at 4 AM, go run with my dog, take a cold shower, study for two hours, go work, meditate, cook, go to MMA practice, read a book before bed" driven. I was very ready to, you know, get after it. As you might notice from the title, this is no longer true. Why?

The first and obvious explanation is that I'm getting older. I have no way of confirming or denying this - it really could be the case that it's some mashup of biological processes that works independently of whatever my subjective experience of life is. But I'm 29, which doesn't seem old at all, so what are the other reasons?

The first reason I can think of is that normal, everyday life is actually difficult. This may be an entirely personal phenomenon, but I find that I semi-consciously categorize my life into two areas: "takes energy" and "doesn't take energy". Things that take energy are the big important things, like studying for some important professional certification or completing a big project or whatever. And things that don't take energy include all the backend admin work: the cooking, the cleaning, the handling of people, the coordinating, the who's gonna take the dog for a walk, the did you remember that we have a family lunch this weekend, and more.

You don't have to be particularly attentive to realize that the "doesn't take energy" category is completely bogus. It's a scam, one that I've willingly enrolled myself into. My general theory for why I've done this to myself is the implicit attitude that if you do things "right", things from this other category shouldn't take time or energy. Like, these are the basics, right, and the basics shouldn't be hard. I don't know, it doesn't make a lot of sense when I look into it, which is why it's a total scam. Things that don't take energy, take energy.

There's something more that's sorta related. Sometimes, you do a thing that "takes energy" and that's it, you've done it, done. But projects usually require maintenance after you do the project itself, so now you have to, again, do the backend admin work. If you study something, you have to apply it or at least go through some flash cards because otherwise, you're losing it. If you train some skill, same thing. If you get promoted, you have a harder baseline job. If you buy a house, congratulations on your second job!

Then there's also the fact that just a basic, regular day isn't always equally draining. If you have some issue at work, you might be tempted to wave it off as a minor hindrance, a minor annoyance, not something worth your energy and attention as you come back home. Because, hey, it's just this silly little thing, I shouldn't be bothered at all. But you can't talk yourself out of a problem you didn't talk yourself into in the first place. So you come home, and sure enough, you have your regular set of things that you're supposed to do now but which don't take energy, but in addition, you've actually, in reality, had a very, very, very difficult day (and you're pretending you didn't because you feel it shouldn't have affected you that much).

So that's one type of explanation. The other one is disillusionment, or, at least, a change of mindset. I can see a change in the type of YouTube video that I can stomach these days. I used to watch those "How I Keep Productive, Work on 15000 Side Hustles, Run 3 Marathons a Day, and Earn 3 Million Dollars A Month" videos and then I stopped. I just can't anymore. And in particular, I can no longer watch stuff that takes inspiration out of fiction. I used to have a small theory that went something like this: you are very affected by the circle of people around you, but it doesn't make tha...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How a ventilation revolution could help mitigate the impacts of air pollution and airborne pathogens, published by Mike Cassidy on November 16, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

edited By Adam Thompson and Joe Buckley

This is a repost from a policy report I wrote a few months back for the UK Labour party here

In searching for air pollution on EA forum, I just came across and read this nice article, which goes into the specifics of the cost effectiveness of using air purifiers to mitigate PM2.5. Otherwise I didn’t see many articles on the EA forum on this topic, despite its considerable public health impact. Furthermore, mitigation strategies suggested here would also increase our resilience to future pandemics & airborne bio risks.

Summary

Governments across the world have made considerable efforts to legislate for food safety, sanitation and drinking water for public health purposes. However, little attention has been given to the quality of air we breathe. Much of the focus around air pollution in recent years has been on outdoor air pollution, but recent studies suggest indoor air pollution can be many times worse, and yet it remains poorly monitored and mitigated.

Air pollution in the major UK cities has been found to be significantly above legal and recommended levels, and is a major cause of lung disease, stroke and heart disease, and has been linked to increases in child asthma, obesity, mental health issues, and COVID-19 mortality. Recently, a nine year old (Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah) was the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as a cause of death, though it is estimated that 40,000 premature deaths in the UK result each year (~8% of all deaths). Evidence shows that in the developed world, we spend up to 90% of our time indoors, yet concentrations of some pollutants can be 2 to 5 times higher than outdoors.

Our policy recommendations include, (i) reducing the source of contaminants (indoor and outdoor, (ii) implementing monitoring and enforce safe indoor limits for pollutants and degree of recirculated air (via CO2); and (iii) installing better ventilation and filtration systems in schools, offices and public buildings. Implementing these would not only help improve the consequences arising from air pollution, but also be transformative in controlling and limiting the spread of respiratory viruses such as COVID-19, flu and other airborne pathogens. Technology already exists to monitor, disinfect and filter air, yet because of weak air quality building regulations, architects and building engineers have instead focussed on thermal comfort, odour control and energy use, whilst neglecting infection control.

Installing or retrofitting ventilation and filtration systems in our buildings will have a cost, but in doing so, it will reduce economic losses from air pollution and respiratory viruses as a result of sick leave and NHS-related health costs. The cost of COVID-19 to the UK in 2020 has been estimated at £251 billion, while, each year, air pollution costs the UK £54 billion, seasonal influenza £30 billion and other respiratory infections £11 billion.

At a critical time in the COVID-19 pandemic, with the environmental bill returning to parliament this autumn and looking to the future, a ventilation revolution may reduce preventable health and economic suffering from both air pollution and airborne illnesses simultaneously.

Introduction

There is now overwhelming and increasing scientific evidence from thousands of studies, that air pollution (both indoor and outdoor) is a significant problem for human health (Schraufnagel et al., 2019). The World Health Organisation (WHO) calls air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk. With 90% of the world living in areas above the WHO air pollution limit, air pollution is the 4th high...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How a ventilation revolution could help mitigate the impacts of air pollution and airborne pathogens, published by Mike Cassidy on November 16, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

edited By Adam Thompson and Joe Buckley

This is a repost from a policy report I wrote a few months back for the UK Labour party here

In searching for air pollution on EA forum, I just came across and read this nice article, which goes into the specifics of the cost effectiveness of using air purifiers to mitigate PM2.5. Otherwise I didn’t see many articles on the EA forum on this topic, despite its considerable public health impact. Furthermore, mitigation strategies suggested here would also increase our resilience to future pandemics & airborne bio risks.

Summary

Governments across the world have made considerable efforts to legislate for food safety, sanitation and drinking water for public health purposes. However, little attention has been given to the quality of air we breathe. Much of the focus around air pollution in recent years has been on outdoor air pollution, but recent studies suggest indoor air pollution can be many times worse, and yet it remains poorly monitored and mitigated.

Air pollution in the major UK cities has been found to be significantly above legal and recommended levels, and is a major cause of lung disease, stroke and heart disease, and has been linked to increases in child asthma, obesity, mental health issues, and COVID-19 mortality. Recently, a nine year old (Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah) was the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as a cause of death, though it is estimated that 40,000 premature deaths in the UK result each year (~8% of all deaths). Evidence shows that in the developed world, we spend up to 90% of our time indoors, yet concentrations of some pollutants can be 2 to 5 times higher than outdoors.

Our policy recommendations include, (i) reducing the source of contaminants (indoor and outdoor, (ii) implementing monitoring and enforce safe indoor limits for pollutants and degree of recirculated air (via CO2); and (iii) installing better ventilation and filtration systems in schools, offices and public buildings. Implementing these would not only help improve the consequences arising from air pollution, but also be transformative in controlling and limiting the spread of respiratory viruses such as COVID-19, flu and other airborne pathogens. Technology already exists to monitor, disinfect and filter air, yet because of weak air quality building regulations, architects and building engineers have instead focussed on thermal comfort, odour control and energy use, whilst neglecting infection control.

Installing or retrofitting ventilation and filtration systems in our buildings will have a cost, but in doing so, it will reduce economic losses from air pollution and respiratory viruses as a result of sick leave and NHS-related health costs. The cost of COVID-19 to the UK in 2020 has been estimated at £251 billion, while, each year, air pollution costs the UK £54 billion, seasonal influenza £30 billion and other respiratory infections £11 billion.

At a critical time in the COVID-19 pandemic, with the environmental bill returning to parliament this autumn and looking to the future, a ventilation revolution may reduce preventable health and economic suffering from both air pollution and airborne illnesses simultaneously.

Introduction

There is now overwhelming and increasing scientific evidence from thousands of studies, that air pollution (both indoor and outdoor) is a significant problem for human health (Schraufnagel et al., 2019). The World Health Organisation (WHO) calls air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk. With 90% of the world living in areas above the WHO air pollution limit, air pollution is the 4th high...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The poetry of progress, published by jasoncrawford on November 15, 2021 on LessWrong.

I’ve said that Western culture, before the World Wars, had a positive philosophy of progress. How do we know that people in that era saw glory, romance, even poetry in progress?

One way we know is that they literally wrote poetry about it. Take, for example, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). By vocation a doctor, he also wrote poems. In 1791, he published The Botanic Garden, of which Part 1, titled “The Economy of Vegetation,” “celebrates scientific progress and technological innovation, such as the forging of steel, the invention of the steam engine and the improvements to gunpowder. It depicts scientists and inventors, such as Benjamin Franklin, responsible for this progress as the heroes of a new age.” (Wikipedia) In one remarkable passage, he praises the power of steam and predicts the steamboat, the locomotive, and the airship:

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer’d Steam! afarDrag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;Or on wide-waving wings expanded bearThe flying-chariot through the fields of air.—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping croud,And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Or take this stanza from “The Engine-Driver to His Engine”, by engineer William J. M. Rankine, which reads less like a classical epic and more like a popular ballad:

My blessing on old George Stephenson! Let his fame for ever last,For he was the man that found the plan to make you run so fast.His arm was strong, his head was long, he knew not guile nor fear;When I think of him it makes me proud that I am an engineer!

Samuel Morse, telegraph inventor, was also praised in poetry. A poem read at his memorial service in 1872 begins by describing mankind as having conquered all of nature except for “the Ocean, the Mountain, and Time and Space”—until Morse came along:

But one morning he made him a slender wire, As an artist’s vision took life and form,While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire, That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;And he carried it over the Mountain’s crest,And dropped it into the Ocean’s breast;And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,That Time and Space ruled man no more.

It wasn’t only amateurs and enthusiasts who wrote poetry praising machines and inventions. No less than Rudyard Kipling wrote of the beauty and glory of the steam engine in “McAndrew’s Hymn.” McAndrew is a Scottish engineer aboard a steamship, and in one passage he compares the engine to an orchestra, after one of the “first-class passengers” asks him, “don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?”:

Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns—the loves an’ doves they dream—Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublimeWhaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time.The Crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump sobs an’ heaves:An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,Till—hear that note?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ through the guides.They’re all awa!

True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goesClear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes.Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed,To work, Ye’ll note, at any tilt an’ every rate o’ speed.Fra skylight-lift to furnace-bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ stayed,An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made;While, out o’ touch o’ vanity, the sweatin’ thrust-block says:“Not unto us the praise, or man—not unto us the praise!”Now, a’ toge...